The Kommandant's Girl Read Online Free PDF

finally released me, she pulled me into the apartment.
    Looking around, I shuddered inwardly: did they really live here? Small and dark and smelling dankly of mold, the single room with its lone cracked window made our modest Kazimierz apartment look like a palace in comparison. I could tell that my mother had tried to make the place habitable, fashioning pale yellow curtains to hang over the cloudy, cracked window and hanging sheets to divide the room into two parts, a makeshift bedroom and a tiny communal living area, barely big enough to hold three chairs and a small table. But it was still horrible.
    “I came back to stay with you, but you were gone.” I could hear the accusing tone in my own voice: why hadn’t you told me where you had gone, or at least left a note?
    “They gave us thirty minutes to leave,” my father said, pulling out two chairs for me and my mother to sit on. “There was no time to get word to you. Where’s Jacob?”
    “His work,” I said simply. They nodded in unison, unsurprised. They were well aware of Jacob’s political activities. Aside from the fact that he was not Orthodox, it was the one thing they did not like about him.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” my father fretted, pacing the floor. “We are older people. Probably no one will bother us. But it is the young people…” He did not have to finish the sentence. The young people were the ones being deported from Kraków. Those who received deportation orders in the ghetto were trapped, unable to run.
    “I had nowhere else to go,” I replied.
    “Well,” my mother said, taking my hand, “at least we are all together. Let’s get you settled.”
    The next morning, I reported to the Jewish Administration Building to register with the Judenrat, the group of ghetto inhabitants designated by the Nazis to run the internal affairs of the ghetto. I was assigned to work in the ghetto orphanage. My parents had already received work assignments, and by some luck, they had also been given reasonable jobs, my father to the communal ghetto kitchen, where he could once again bake, my mother to the infirmary as a nurse’s aide. We had all managed to escape the dreaded work details, where Jews were forced to perform heavy manual labor outside the ghetto walls under the eyes of brutal Nazi guards.
    I began working that afternoon. The orphanage was a small, two-story facility that the Judenrat had established on Josefinska Street. The inside was dark and overcrowded, but a tiny grass enclosure behind the nursery gave the children, mostly toddlers, a place to play. It housed about thirty children, virtually all of whom had lost their parents since the start of the war. I enjoyed watching them. Aside from being woefully thin from the meager ghetto rations, they were still children, oblivious to the war, their abysmal surroundings and the dire situation of having no parents to care for them in an uncaring world.
    Yet despite the small amount of pleasure I took in my job, I thought constantly of Jacob. Surrounded by children, I was often reminded of the family we might have started by then, if not for the war. At night I played back our moments together in my head, our courtship, our wedding, and after. The nights had been few and dear enough that I could remember every single one. Staring up at the low ceiling of our apartment, I thought guiltily, defiantly, of sex, of the silent, unexpected joys that Jacob had fleetingly taught me. Where was Jacob? I worried each night as I lay in bed, and whom he was with? There must be girls in the resistance, yet Jacob had not asked me to join him. I wondered with shame not if Jacob was hurt or warm enough, but whether he was faithful, or if some braver, bolder woman had stolen his heart.
    I was lonely not just for Jacob but for other company, too. My parents, overwhelmed by the twelve-hour work shifts spent almost entirely on their feet, had little energy to do more than eat their rations and crawl into bed at