The Girl from Krakow Read Online Free PDF

thighs. He decided on an approach Rita would remember. It was one of several things he had learned in Paris years before.

CHAPTER TWO
    N ot everything Tadeusz Sommermann said that afternoon was a complete lie. He had been in Barcelona, and he was going back. He had treated a few combat casualties from the International Brigades. Remember that Englishman with the look-alike pencil mustache and the bullet wound in his throat? What a waste to be maimed like that. It was the Spaniards’ Civil War, not his. Of course, he knew what side he was on. The “Nationalists”—that’s what they called themselves—were just fascists, openly armed by Hitler and Mussolini. Their caudillo , their Führer , Franco, didn’t have any qualms about using Moroccan shock troops. Surely there was more useful work Tadeusz could do than stop a Moorish bullet while pumping morphine into some illiterate Republican foot soldier’s thigh. He would support the Spanish Republic. That it was supported by several different communist parties in Spain and by Stalin’s Soviet Union didn’t trouble Tadeusz at all. But he was neither a Stalinist party hack nor a supporter of POUM, the Trotskyite party. Paris had made him “a plague on both your houses” leftist. He needed to preserve his freedom of action, even on the barricades of the Popular Front.
    The idea of going to Spain had come to him when he first heard about the International Brigades, after his final year of medical lectures in Marseille. Tadeusz had begun his medical degree in Paris. For two years he had allowed its distractions to seduce him. He needed to get away if he was ever to complete his medical qualification. Moving to Marseille, he enrolled in the faculty of tropical medicine. It was open to foreigners, and afterward posts in a French colony—Senegal or Guyana—were not hard to secure. Few French medical students really wanted to spend a half dozen years in Dakar or Cayenne. But the closer he came to climbing up the gangplank of some colonial paquebot , the more distasteful grew the prospect of serving as a colonial health officer. There had to be an alternative.
    There always had been. He had always found the intelligent alternative before—a way around obstacles, hardships, challenges—as far back as his childhood.
    From the time he was a small boy, Tadeusz knew that his mother’s bookshop was not for him. He loved reading: first the endless stream of Karl May westerns shelved behind the counter to reduce pilfering, then the histories—especially Napoleon, and finally the Marxian scholars who made sense of Napoleon and everything that came after him. History was intoxicating. But reading books was not the same as selling them. He couldn’t be tethered to Jastrob’s Bookshop .
    Tadeusz had been good at school, and better at chess, which was fortunate since he had neither the physique for heavy labor nor the temperament for poker. At fourteen or so, it was clear. The way out was a profession. That meant university abroad. He could never bring himself to study as hard as he’d need to for a chance in Poland.
    Tadeusz would have liked to study history. But there were problems. First, by the time he finished gymnasium , Tadeusz had already acquired a pretty tolerable understanding of the course of human events over the previous several centuries. There wasn’t much more to learn once he had discovered scientific socialism. Plekhanov’s Materialist Conception of History was really all you needed. At twenty, he’d read enough to see that history was an open book. He understood everything now.
    But even if there had been more to learn about history, there was no living in it. If he were to escape Jastrob’s Bookshop, Karpatyn, or Galicia, for that matter, it would have to be medicine, six years of it, and in another country.
    Italy would have been the best bet for medical school. With an Italian qualification, one could work in the British Empire. Entry was not difficult,