“Before Berlin” Sneak Peek

CHAPTER ONE

17 August 1941

“Schritt vorwärts! Kopf hoch! Arme aus!” The sharp demands in a thick German accent came swiftly. Step forward. Chin out. Arms up. I hardly had time to turn to my left to see Renia, my best friend of ten years, performing the same ridiculous movements with an equally sour-faced woman in front of her. The long horizontal line of students extended the length of our stone courtyard, chunks of concrete still littered the ground even now, nearly two years after the explosions rocked our school. Another dozen or so girls clustered near the outer gate, awaiting their turn.

“Open your mouth.” The timeworn taskmistress inched closer to me, but even in youth, I towered her by a head at the very least. She stretched her neck and leaned forward. The sulfurous scent of mustard reeked from her lips as they curved into an ardent scowl. When she spoke, her jowls wiggled loosely above her crisp, clean uniform collar, but it was the brown mole near her chin with the solitary hair protruding, that captured my full attention.

“Do you have all of your teeth?” She inspected my mouth thoroughly.

I nodded.

She tugged on the end of my braid that hung freely down the right side of my chest, the lower locks nearly reaching my waist.

“Gute länge.”

I snuck a glance at Renia once more and wiggled my brows carefully, so this madam did not see my disrespect. What a relief the length of my hair had passed her inspection. I fought the giggle building in my throat. Such an odd thing for her to find so satisfactory.

A tall, reedy woman shadowed the ill-tempered one. She clutched a simple clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“Mache Notizen.” The demanding one pointed for her to take notes, then turned back to me. “What is your name?”

I recognized my good fortune of having learned German years ago, even before they arrived in my city. While other fellow classmates struggled with the foreign demands, I understood her well enough.

“Aleksandra.” I answered proudly, named after my oma, my mother’s mama, who died before my birth.

“Family name?”

“Jaworski.”

“Age?”

“Sixteen.”

“Kennkarte?”

I pulled the small, beige paper book from my pocket. I rarely went anywhere without it since its issuance from the Generalne Gubernatorstwo at the beginning of the year. She reached for it and scanned its contents carefully, focusing her attention on the black and white photograph with my thumbprints and signature above the official seal. She turned the page for my family lineage.

“Schmidt?” she grunted. “Maternal?”

“Yes, Frau, my oma came from East Prussia.”

“Hmmm.” She handed it to the other woman and faced me again.

“Turn around.”

I rotated my back towards her. Why is she inspecting my person so closely? My brother, Ivan, who had been enlisted through conscript eighteen months before had not been scrutinized so closely when the German soldiers came to our home.

My breath hitched at a wayward thought.  A faint recollection emerged from an event I tried hard to forget…a collection of people—people with a unified belief—seized from their homes, lined up in the street and marched away…but I am not Jewish! And as my papers just proved, I am not entirely Polish either—I justified, quite aware of the hostility directed towards Poles. When my grandmother, Aleksandra Schmidt, came to Łódź to attend art school, she met and married my grandfather, choosing never to return to Prussia.

The woman pinched my side. The movement made me jump. I was ticklish there.

“Stand still,” she snapped. Though she had a solid grip on my waist there wasn’t much to grasp and the tighter she held on the more it hurt.

She spoke to her scribe. “Tall, but skinny. Good posture and hips. Send her to Medical.”

Offended at her command to see the doctor, I scrunched my nose. I am quite healthy, I wanted to argue. Other than a scare of scarlet fever at the age of four, I hardly got sick. And at this very moment, I could outrun anyone in this school, including the old bag.

The SS’s sudden disruption of our school day had come unexpectedly. This had happened often in the beginning of the German occupation, but not recently, and none of the previous appearances required us to stand outside for hours in the sweltering heat.

Within a week of their arrival into Poland, the Germans had closed almost all the schools in the city…but not this one. New instructors, altered curriculum, and stifling rules were put in place. Rumors circulated amongst the girls as to why we were spared—whispered conjectures included suggestions as eccentric as our headmistress being involved in the Third Reich, to training a new generation of Hitler youth who could also offer childbearing qualities, to the most realistic…we all had German familial ties. I ignored them all. Though we no longer had our beloved Polish teachers, Polish language, literature, culture, and arts, I excelled in math and sciences and, above all, being in school meant being away from the horrors and atrocities occurring outside of it.

“Dreh dich um.”

When I turned forward again at the command of the clipboard woman, the female soldier had moved on to the next girl. The scribe scribbled something on a piece of paper then shoved it into my hand.

“Siebzehn,” I whispered as I read it. The number 17 appeared on the square sheet.

The Germans gave us little choice but to follow every direction given. The blatant slaughtering of Poles proved not only their power, but their hatred for our countrymen. My family learned first-hand the consequences of having a father in the government. As a Parliamentarian, he should have been killed. Instead, the new commanders forced him to labor as the liaison between the Poles and our new German Mayor, Albert Leister…that, and a reminder bullet to each knee—they claimed he didn’t need to walk to do his job. His brother, Borys, and a dozen other men who worked in his office were not so fortunate. Determined to be a threat by the intelligenzaktion, they were detained and sent to the Radogoszcz prison in November, then executed the following May 1940.

From the moment the soldiers entered our classrooms this morning through now, I hadn’t been afraid. Though they were stern and forceful, nothing in their conversations led me to believe our lives were threatened.

This was far from the invasion in September 1939.

Though Łódź was smaller than Warsaw, its location became key to the German’s continued pursuits against enemies of the state. Our lack of adequate equipment and poor defenses, especially against Blitzkrieg, allowed for an effortless seizure when our Polish army collapsed in mere days under the pressure of the Third Reich. Within that first month, not only did they sever our transportation, but they also carried out mass searches, committed crimes against the population, public executions, restructured the government with German officials, issued occupation decrees, renamed the city as Litzmannstadt, and annexed us into Nazi, Germany.

My mind easily slipped back to those early days…the deafening sounds of gunfire, explosions, and above all, the horrifying screams that were forever etched in my memory. At fourteen, I lived through the worst nightmare imaginable or so I thought with my limited life experience…until I witnessed the expulsion, the process in which the Germans managed the Jewish population. They claimed that the people of the Jewish faith were diseased and brought filth and degradation upon us, but especially upon our new landlords. By February of 1940, the Judes had been removed to a ghetto—a controlled residential quarter in the northeastern section of town—surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. My friend Erela, along with her parents and sister, who lived in the flat across from us, were subjected to their swift removal and forced relocation. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.