The Children's War (125 page)

Both men had equally disturbed nights as they worried about their wives. Ryszard dreamt that the SS Lebensborn inspected Kasia’s documents and decided that although she had been declared
Volksdeutsch,
her blood was sufficiently tainted that she did not deserve to keep her child. He saw them tearing the babe away from her as she screamed and fought them. Groaning, he rose from his bed and made his way down the stairs to the liquor cabinet.

“Ah, so you’re up as well,” Peter greeted him.

“Dreams. You, too?”

“Yeah. Keep dreaming Zosia kills the nurses to stop them from stealing Piotr, and then she gets dragged off and executed. Decided I’d rather remain awake than see that one more time.”

“What time is it?”

“Nearly three. Want to play some poker?”

“Sure. That’ll kill a few hours. Besides, I could use the cash.”

“In your dreams.” Peter laughed. “But two’s no fun, let’s see if Pawel and Andrzej want to play.”

“Good idea.” Ryszard laughed as well. “If we get them when they’re sleepy, maybe we’ll manage to win for once.”

52

D
ESPITE THE FEARS
and nervous agitation suffered all round, the night passed without incident. Ryszard managed to rescue Kasia, Piotr, and Zosia from the hospital the following morning, and over the next few days life in the household
returned to normal. Piotr was adored by all, Pawel continued seeing Liesel, and Peter and Zosia continued to see Magdalena nearly every day. Several times, perhaps out of sheer boredom, Teresa accompanied Liesel to the Traugutt household and stayed there with her sister while the nanny went off on her husband-catching venture. On those days, Peter was trapped upstairs, out of sight while Zosia and Teresa tended to Madzia and Piotr. Pawel made a point of having an appointment and returning earlier than usual on those days, so Peter’s exile was not interminable. More than once though, when Liesel and Pawel returned to the house, the two girls from the Vogel household stayed on and visited. Teresa seemed to enjoy talking to Pawel, and he seemed in no great hurry to leave when she was around. Liesel sat with her arms possessively around her man but was usually unable to interrupt the conversation as it strayed into topics with which she was totally unfamiliar. Eventually Pawel would have mercy on both Liesel and Peter and would disappear to go to his appointment; then the two girls stayed only long enough to appear polite before taking their leave.

“She’s a bright girl,” Zosia opined as Peter emerged into the sitting room soon after the girls and the baby had left one evening.

He nodded sadly.

“Tomorrow’s the last day,” she reminded him needlessly.

“I know.”

“While we watched Madzia together, I’ve managed to talk to Teresa a bit. I guess she likes slumming.”

“No, she’s just a sweet kid, and I would guess, a bit lonely.” He stared down the path that Magdalena had taken.

“She told me about you, about when you tried to teach Ulrike, and what happened to you then. She said that you taught her about courage.”

“Courage,” he repeated, somewhat disconcerted. He had only just come to terms with his cowardice during those years of abject submissiveness. Courage?

“I had her promise to take care of Magdalena, to make sure she wasn’t ignored. I told her that Madzia deserves love, that she’s a special little girl. She seemed to know what I meant.” Zosia winked at him.

He nodded, embarrassed. “How did you manage to convey such privileged information?”

“Oh, I used my mysterious Gypsy-style voice. It’s very useful when one wants to convey information while maintaining a faÁade of ignorance and inferiority.”

“Yes, I should have resorted to it,” he murmured. Courage?

“And Kasia told her to come by with the child at any time. She likes Pawel, so you can bet she’ll be here. Magdalena will be well cared for.”

He smiled his thanks, but still his eyes strayed unbidden to the path his daughter had taken.

The following evening he watched the path even more hopelessly as Liesel and Pawel approached the house. He gave his daughter one last kiss, and Madzia gave him a hug and wiped at the tears that ran down his face. She giggled at the
wet warmth and sucked her fingers to determine its taste. Making a face at the salty water, she squirmed in his arms and he set her down. She toddled over to Zosia, who went into the hall to deliver her into Liesel’s care. As was now her habit, she howled at the disruption in her playtime and clung to Zosia’s neck. Zosia carefully extracted her and, ignoring Liesel’s presence, kissed the child. Liesel gasped in horror and looked meaningfully to Pawel to upbraid his uppity, servant, but he just shrugged. As Liesel said her good-bye to Pawel, Zosia withdrew into the sitting room to see how her husband was coping. Peter watched from a window as Liesel retreated back down the path with her charge. He brushed the tears from his face with an impatience that betrayed his embarrassment.

“I’ll miss her,” Zosia ventured. “She has a lot of personality.”

Peter nodded. “I’m glad you talked with Teresa. I feel a lot better about her care.”

“Don’t worry, love, something will work out.”

He shook his head slowly. What could they possibly do? There was nothing short of stealing the child, and unlike their adversaries, they did not indulge in kidnapping. There were far too many pressing problems to waste resources and political advantage on sorting out the details of one person’s life; Tadek’s wife was certain proof of that. No, he would never get permission to abduct his own child, and without permission and therefore without a place for her to live, he could offer her no life at all.

They returned to Szaflary and spent the remaining time before their departure preparing for their trip to America. In order to arm himself with both the relevant facts and the emotional fire to convince the American public of the justice of their struggle, Peter went to the library and delved into the archives that Katerina had pointed out to him. He was not unfamiliar with the history therein; nevertheless, the documented brutality and mass murder still horrified him. His head swam with images of humans packed into quicklime-laden freight cars and agonizingly burned to death, of gas spraying from shower heads asphyxiating helpless, naked, shaved people, of mass graves with broken and distorted bodies, of starved children with staring eyes, of walkways paved with the ashes of the dead, of shattered bones and bombed cities, of massacred villages and hanged hostages and millions upon millions of murdered innocents. The words appalled him, they haunted him, and they also raised a question in his mind: What was the point in telling his story? How was his paltry, miserable tale possibly going to impress a people who had remained unmoved by all that had gone before?

Alex listened to Peter’s question patiently and explained that history was insignificant to most people: “Hell, on a world scale, most of this stuff pales into insignificance! What we need is someone these people can see and hear and touch. Your story alone will be sufficient. Your hurt will become their hurt, your anger will become their anger. Don’t look at any history—we’ve had too much of
that and to no good effect. Work on presenting yourself, just yourself. Do whatever it takes to make yourself acceptable and sympathetic to the Americans. That’s an order!”

So, Peter read magazines and newspapers and watched a series of videos that Zosia scrounged up for him. Using the reviews and political fallout from each documentary or press conference or personal interview, and discussing details with Alex and Anna, they homed in on what they believed would be an acceptable television persona for him to present to the world.

First and foremost, they decided that absolute honesty was out. Genuineness would have to be sacrificed to avoid aggravating vocal segments of the American population. They decided Alex was right: though love was something that he could talk about freely, and sex he could mention indirectly, it was essential that Allison be his wife rather than another man’s wife. The pain of their separation, the depth of his feeling, the grief at her death, would not be believed otherwise. He would be labeled an adulterer, and all else that followed in his story might be interpreted as divine retribution, as unlikely as God was to use the National Socialist regime to carry out heavenly justice.

His affair with Elspeth was clearly off-limits, not only because it would offend a segment of right-thinking Americans, but also because it could endanger Elspeth and by extension Magdalena. And they would have to avoid the fact that he had technically committed a criminal offense by draft-dodging. In a society as fanatical about crime and punishment as America seemed to be, the label
criminal
was all too likely to provoke a response that he only got what he deserved.

They decided he would have to work on his accent. Too strong an accent would be viewed as too foreign and therefore not only incomprehensible, but also not worthy of attention or sympathy. Also, it was clear from the entertainment media that his accent was appropriate to the lower classes and would be ascribed to a criminal milieu, and again, it would then be likely that the rest of his story would be considered irrelevant. Gangsters and street thugs could expect to live a life of random violence and arrest, what did they have to do with social justice on a worldwide scale?

It wasn’t difficult for him to change his accent; for although he spoke as everyone around him in London had spoken, he had earlier in his life learned a more old-fashioned accent from his parents. Only when they had given up speaking English to him and had switched to German had he adopted the rough tones and vocabulary of his boyhood friends and later his Underground comrades. With a bit of effort he recovered his parents’ accent; that, combined with his usual speech patterns and some deliberate Americanisms added for clarity, left him with an understandable and reasonably pleasing voice. “Mid-Atlantic” Zosia called it, though to himself, he sounded like a foreigner in his own tongue.

Upon Alex’s insistence they decided he would have to give up smoking and drinking for the duration of the visit. He could indulge in a social drink on rare occasions in public, but he should not, even once, light up a cigarette. “You can
do it in private,” Alex confided. “Everyone does, just don’t do it in public—not unless you want to get dragged into a debate on alcohol and tobacco.”

“Maybe a debate would be amusing,” Peter suggested.

“No!” Alex almost screamed. “You have no idea! For God’s sake don’t comment on any American issue. All you’ll do is divert attention from our cause, make enemies, and get screamed at by fanatics. No discussions of cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, crime, racism—except as it applied to you—abortion, religion . . . Well, you get the point. It will become obvious which topics to avoid when you’re here. Oh, yeah, make sure you leave the
Kommandant
out of your story. If you aren’t condemned for being a queer, you’ll be accused of being homophobic. And some women’s group would no doubt claim you are degrading women.”

“How so?”

“Oh, let’s say, you’d be trivializing the trauma of rape by implying it can happen to a man . . .”

Peter listened somewhat aghast as Alex constructed possible scenarios for which Peter could be denounced by various interest groups. Would it really be like that? Like stepping into a snake pit? Each word placing him near to some poisonous jaws waiting to inject their venom? He had no conception of the pitfalls of free debate in a free society and had naively thought that his story would be accepted for what it was: his story.

“. . . In fact, no sex at all, if you can avoid it. They’re squeamish about that,” Alex concluded.

“Sex? What about violence and murder?”

“No problem there. Their kids have it served up on TV with their breakfast cereal. And that reminds me: learn what a typical diet is and don’t admit to preferring anything else. They think it’s odd if you don’t have cereal and milk for breakfast. And watch your sense of humor—they might think you’re weird, and you’re going to have to be careful about your childhood—their assumptions are going to be completely different from yours. No gangs, make sure your parents are warm and caring, and your school—try to make it sound like a positive experience—”

“Nobody had a childhood like that,” Peter protested. “I’ll sound like a freak!”

“No, you’ll sound like a kid with an ideal American childhood rather than a Nazi-English one. Look, we want them to give money to help us overthrow the government, not support the various social programs they might think we need there. And that reminds me, make sure everything now is just perfect with your life, okay?”

“Why?”

“They like happy endings. Your escaping is like Cinderella putting on that glass slipper. That’s it, no adjustment difficulties, no reality afterwards, just smiles and warm, understanding revolutionaries welcoming you into their arms and praising you for your noble sacrifices. Your experiences are going to be an analogy for our entire land, and we want to make sure when they give us money, they can walk away smiling, knowing that everything’s going to be all right now.”

“How about if I just keep quiet about the afterwards part?” Peter asked. Zosia sputtered quietly.

“Yeah, that will work, too. They’ll assume the best. Just be careful that we don’t turn their sympathies away from our struggle and towards some softhearted victims’ groups. In any case, try to be a bit more buoyant. They often misinterpret the Brits here, think they’re too cold and unfeeling. If you’re not a bit more bouncy—”