God knew what her bricked-up secret space had cost her—maybe 5,000 zł., maybe 10,000.
She’d mentioned it a number of times to Mrs. Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs. Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore, on the morning Danka and Mrs. Dresner heard from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling noise, the bark of Dalmatians and Dobermans, the megaphoned roaring of Oberscharführers, they hurried to their friend’s place.
When the Dresners had gone up the stairs and found the right room, they could see that the clamor had had an effect on their friend. “It sounds bad,” said the woman. “I have my parents in there already. I can fit the girl in. But not you.”
Danka stared, captivated, at the end wall, at its stained wallpaper. In there, sandwiched in brick, rats perhaps worrying at their feet, their senses stretched by darkness, were this woman’s elderly mother and father.
Mrs. Dresner could tell that the woman wasn’t rational. The girl, but not you, she kept saying. It was as if she thought that should the SS penetrate the wall they would be more forgiving on account of Danka’s lesser poundage. Mrs. Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese, that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this side of Lwówska Street, and that she had nowhere else to go. And that she could fit. Danka was a reliable girl, said Mrs. Dresner, but she would feel safer with her mother in there. You could see by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two blocks distant swept away the last of the woman’s reason. “I can fit the girl!” she screamed. “I want you to go!”
Mrs. Dresner turned to Danka and told her to go into the wall. Later Danka would not know why she had obeyed her mother and gone so mutely into hiding. The woman took her to the attic, removed a rug from the floor, then lifted a raft of floorboards. Then Danka descended into the cavity. It wasn’t black in there; the parents were burning a stub of candle. Danka found herself beside the woman—someone else’s mother but, beyond the unwashed smell, with the same warm, protective musk of motherhood. The woman smiled at her briefly. The husband stood on the far side of his wife, keeping his eyes closed, not to be distracted from signals from outside.
After a time the friend’s mother motioned to her that she could sit if she wanted. So Danka crouched sideways and found a comfortable posture on the floor of the cavity. No rats troubled her. She heard no sound—not a word from her mother and the friend beyond the wall. Above everything else she felt unexpectedly safe. Andwiththe sensation of safety came displeasure at herself for obeying her mother’s order so woodenly, and then fear for her mother, who was out there in the world of Aktions.
Mrs. Dresner did not leave the house at once. The SS were in Dabrowski Street now. She thought she might as well stay on. If she was taken, it was no loss to her friend. It might, in fact, be a positive help. If they took a woman from this room, it would probably increase their satisfaction with their task, exempt them from a sharper inspection of the state of the wallpaper.
But the woman had convinced herself no one would survive the search if Mrs. Dresner stayed in the room; and, Mrs. Dresner could see, no one would if the woman remained in that state. Therefore she stood up, calmly despairing of herself, and left. They would find her on the steps or in the hall. Why not on the street? she wondered. It was so much an unwritten rule that ghetto natives must stay on quivering in their rooms until discovered that anyone found moving on the stairways was somehow guilty of defiance of the system.
A figure in a cap prevented her from going out. He appeared on the front step, squinting down the dark corridor to the cold blue light of the courtyard beyond. Staring at her, he recognized her, as she did him. It was an acquaintance of her elder son’s; but you could not be sure that that counted for anything; you could not know what pressures they’d put on the OD boys. He stepped into the hall and approached her. “Pani Dresner,” he said. He pointed at the stairwell. “They’ll be gone in ten minutes. You stay under the stairs. Go on. Get under the stairs.”
As numbly as her daughter had obeyed her, she now obeyed the OD youth. She crouched down under the stairs, but knew it was no good. The autumn light from the courtyard revealed her. If they wanted to look at the courtyard, or at the apartment door at the rear of the hallway, she would be seen. Since upright or cowering made no difference, she stood upright. From near the front door, the OD man urged her to stay there. Then he went. She heard yells, orders, and appeals, and it all seemed to be as close as next door.
At last, he was back with others. She heard the boots at the front door. She heard him say in German that he’d searched the ground floor and no one was at home. There were occupied rooms upstairs, though. It was such a prosaic conversation he had with the SS men that it didn’t seem to her to do justice to the risk he was taking. He was staking his existence against the likelihood that having worked down Lwówska and so far down Dabrowski they might by now be incompetent enough not to search the ground floor themselves and therefore not to find Mrs. Dresner, whom he dimly knew, beneath the stairs.
In the end they took his word. She heard them on the stairs, opening and slamming doors on the first landing, their boots clattering on the floor in the room of the cavity. She heard her friend’s raised, shrewish voice… of course I have a work permit, I work over at the Gestapo mess, I know all the gentlemen. She heard them come down from the second floor with someone; with more than one; a couple, a family. Substitutes for me, she would later think. A middle-aged male voice with an edge of bronchitis to it said, “But surely, gentlemen, we can take some clothing.” And in a tone as indifferent as that of a railway porter asked for timetable information, the SS man telling him in Polish, “There’s no need for it. At these places they provide everything.”
The sound receded. Mrs. Dresner waited. There was no second sweep. The second sweep would be tomorrow or the day after. They would return again and again now, culling the ghetto. What in June had been seen as a culminating horror had become by October a daily process. And as grateful as she was to the OD boy, it was clear as she went upstairs to get Danka that when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow you could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system. The more Orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan—”An hour of life is still life.” The OD boy had given her that hour. She knew there was no one who could give her more.