Such Good Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

she didn’t see Dr. Katz or her husband among them, and this gave her hope. But she didn’t dare advance any farther to investigate. To associate herself with any of the dead men would be suicide. The corpses would remain hanging there for weeks.
    Before the day was over, she learned that Dr. Katz had managed to jump out of a second-story window and hide in a cobbler’s workshop nearby. He was still alive and reunited with his wife. But Daniel? No one knew for sure.
    That night, still hopeful, Laura waited for her husband’s return. By morning, her hope had evaporated. If he were alive, she knew, surely he would have gotten word to her. Unless he had been captured, or was hiding in the forest. But false hope was something she couldn’t afford. She resigned herself to the likelihood that her husband was gone, Daniel, the man about whom Laura had once written her cousin Tonka in Tel Aviv, “Danek is sweet, loving; I love him with all my heart as a husband, a lover, a friend. Everybody at home is very attached to him and he to them. Grandma never takes her eyes from him. They made out fine with such a son-in-law.”
    Laura still had her daughter and siblings; the others were gone.
    The day after the Aktion, September 2, 1942, was Selma’s fifth birthday, but there was no party, and no presents, unless her mother’s soothing lie counted; she had quickly concocted the fiction that her father was working for the Russians for a while and would return someday.
    But Selma wasn’t soothed. After listening to the sound of German boots like gunfire on the cobblestones outside and sometimes on the stairwell, she had felt safe only when her father got home from his job in the evening and she could run to him and hug his legs—even when he still worked in the bakery and would be covered in flour. He was blond and had gray-green eyes, just like she did, and she wanted him back. Now.
    Selma curled up on a makeshift cot and sobbed into her pillow as Laura watched, berating herself for saying the Russians had taken him. Had there not been a softer lie to tell her, something that promised her father’s quicker return, something to get the little girl through these days? Did it even matter, anyway, since they would all be dead soon? Laura comforted her daughter as best she could, but who would comfort her? Only her daughter stood between her and serious thoughts of suicide, which would be so much easier than living another day.
    Only God knew what was going on in her daughter’s head, but her mother saw how quiet she had become, how she endured each new terror in silence. Every once in a while, bright images of their old life peeked through the darkness to torture Laura—her grandparents’ Shabbos dinners, the sight of Daniel working on timber-export numbers late at night, how Selma reacted to her first taste of orange—but she would shoulder them away. Look, she thought, look what history has done to us. Would her little girl ever know that not far away Jews were digging their own graves and waiting for the bullet to the base of the skull?
    Later that night, the night of Selma’s fifth birthday, Laura met with her brother Manek and her two sisters, Putzi and Fryda, and they decided to escape with the false papers that had been Daniel’s last gifts to all of them. They decided that Putzi and Fryda would leave first for Kraków by train, after which Laura and Selma would follow a few days later, and finally Manek. There was nothing to lose.
    That Putzi was even still alive to make a run for it was itself a miracle. Group by group, the young Jewish women she worked with making military uniforms for the Germans had been taken away and deported until there was only one group left—Putzi’s. When the SS men came for them, Putzi ducked down behind her machine, slid to the floor, and held her breath. Somehow the Germans didn’t notice. After they marched the other women away, Putzi remained on the floor, alone and trembling, waiting