Lilac Girls

  The man introduced himself as Mr. Snyder, unfurled my felt roll, and extracted one oyster fork, as gently as one extracts saffron from a crocus. With his jeweler’s loupe to one eye, he examined the Woolsey family crest atop it. Mr. Snyder would no doubt be impressed with that coat of arms, extraordinary in sterling: two filigreed lions in silhouette holding the crest aloft, above it a naked arm, shinbone in hand, rising from a medieval knight’s helmet.

  Mr. Snyder read the words inscribed on the band of the crest: “Manus Haec Inimica Tyrannis.”

  “It’s our family code. It means ‘This hand with shinbone shall only be raised in anger against a tyrant or tyranny itself.’ ” How could Mr. Snyder not be eager to have such history in his shop?

  “What is your best price?” I asked.

  “This is not a tag sale, Miss Ferriday—Clignancourt flea market is that way,” he said, pointing in the direction of Paris with one tarnish-blackened finger.

  Mr. Snyder spoke excellent English with just a trace of a German accent. Though his name sounded English, he was of German extraction. I assumed Snyder was once spelled Schneider and was anglicized for business reasons. After World War I, transplanted Germans had been the targets of American prejudice, though that tide had turned recently in the United States, and many Americans were decidedly pro-German. The name Goodrich had probably been added to make the store sound British, for there was no evidence of a Mr. Goodrich.

  Mr. Snyder felt the oyster fork all over as a blind man might feel a face, flexed the ends of the tines, then huffed a breath onto it.

  “Tines not stretched. That’s good. Hallmark is clogged. Have these been dipped?”

  “Never,” I said. “Only cotton wool and Goddard’s.”

  I fought the urge to curry favor with a smile. With the French at least, smiling was a tactical error, a sign of American weakness.

  Mr. Snyder took the four-sided end of a wooden matchstick and twirled it in the hallmark. The pink of his scalp, which shone through his thin white hair, matched the polish on his rag.

  “Good,” Mr. Snyder said. He waved a finger at me. “But always leave silver tarnished, and polish as you need it. Tarnish protects it.”

  “The silver belonged to my great-grandmother Eliza Woolsey,” I said. I was surprised that I suddenly wanted to cry.

  “Everything in here belonged to someone’s great-grandmother. I’ve not taken a lemon, sardine, cherry, or oyster fork in five years, never mind your twelve. No market for them.”

  For someone who proclaimed the benefits of tarnish, he kept his own sterling well shined.

  “Maybe I’ll try Sotheby’s,” I said.

  Mr. Snyder began rolling up the brown cloth. “Fine. They don’t know a bouillon spoon from a nut scoop.”

  “The Woolsey silver is featured in the book Treasures of the Civil War.”

  He waved one hand toward the case behind him. “That Astor punch bowl is from the French Revolution.”

  Mr. Snyder changed his attitude once I switched to his native tongue. For the first time, I was happy Father had insisted I learn German.

  “The book also mentions a loving cup which belonged to my great-grandmother Eliza Woolsey,” I said, forcing the German past tense of “belong” from some deep recess.

  “How do you know German?” he asked with a smile.

  “School. Chapin.”

  “Is your loving cup sterling?” he asked, continuing in German.

  “Yes, and gold. Given to her by the family of a young corporal she nursed at Gettysburg. He would have died from his wounds were it not for Eliza, and they sent her the cup with a lovely letter.”

  “Gettysburg, a terrible battle. Is the cup engraved?”

  “To Eliza Woolsey with deepest gratitude,” I said. “It features the god Pan on the front holding baskets of gold flowers.”

  “Do you still have the letter?”

  “Yes, it details the corporal’s escape from the swamps of Chickahominy.”

  “Good provenance,” Mr. Snyder said.

  I would have taken a bullet rather than part with that cup, but the story softened Mr. Snyder enough for him to make me an offer on the forks.

  “Forty-five dollars is my best,” he said. “Sterling hasn’t recovered since the difficulties.”

  It had been more than ten years since Black Tuesday. By 1941 our economy was on the mend, but some people could still not bring themselves to say the word “depression.”

  “Mr. Snyder, you could melt them down and make seventy-five dollars.”

  “Sixty.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You are a pleasure to work with,” Mr. Snyder said. “The Jews come in here like they are doing me a favor.”

  I pushed myself back from the counter.

  “Mr. Snyder, I am sorry if I gave you the impression I would tolerate any kind of slur. I don’t know how they do things in Germany, but I don’t do business with anti-Semites.”

  I rolled up the brown cloth with my forks inside.

  “Please, Miss Ferriday. I misspoke. Do forgive me.”

  “This country was founded on principles of equality and fairness, and you would do well to remember that. I don’t think it would help your business to have people think you harbor negative feelings toward any one group.”

  “I certainly will remember that,” he said and gently pulled the forks from my hands. “Please accept my deepest apologies.”

  “Apology accepted. I don’t hold grudges, Mr. Snyder, but I do hold the people I do business with to high standards.”

  “I appreciate that, Miss Ferriday, and I’m sorry I offended you.”

  I left Snyder and Goodrich that day with renewed optimism and enough cash in my pocket to post both my comfort packages and a case of donated Ovaltine. I comforted myself with the idea that sometimes one must make a deal with the devil in order to help those in need. I’d done business with an anti-Semite, but it was in the service of the beleaguered.

  Thanks to Mr. Snyder, fifty parentless French children would know they’d not been forgotten.

  1941–1942

  Binz sent me to the bunker for two weeks for my insubordination toward Irma Grese. The punishment block lived up to its reputation: Solitary confinement in a cold, dark cell furnished only with one wooden stool. Armies of cockroaches. I spent my time mourning Mrs. Mikelsky and plotting revenge scenarios against the Germans, the blackness growing in my chest. They would pay for what they did to Mrs. Mikelsky. I played out scenes in my head there in the dark cell. Me leading a mass escape. Me murdering Binz with a stool leg. Me writing coded letters to Papa, naming names. I would have to be patient, but that day would come.

  The following spring, Matka visited us one Sunday, a gift from heaven since she’d been moved to the elite barracks and we rarely saw her. She surprised us at our bunk before bedtime, as Luiza, Zuzanna, Janina, and I gathered to play a silly game. We called it What I’d Bring Down Beauty Road. Beauty Road had taken on another meaning by then. In the event of an execution, this was the road one was forced to walk down to the shooting wall. If a girl was lucky, she had time to have her camp family fix her hair and arrange her clothes so she’d look beautiful taking that final walk.

  In this game, each of us competed to come up with the funniest thing we’d bring if marched to our death at the shooting wall. Strange as it may sound now, we took comfort in many such morbid games then, such as Pink Smoke, Blue Smoke, where we would predict the color of a girl’s smoke at the furnaces in town. Tired and terribly hungry as we all were, after twelve hours of work, it helped to laugh at it all.

  Matka climbed into my bunk and kissed me on the forehead. She wore the electric yellow armband of those privileged prisoners who could roam the camp. I ran my finger across the raised, red script embroidered on the cloth band and felt a queer chill run through me.

  I shook off my bad feelings. How good it was to see her! My eye caught the little length of blue string she’d tied around her ring finge
r. To remind her she was still married to Papa?

  “I can only stay a little while,” she said, out of breath from running all the way from Block One. The doors were locked at nine each night, no exceptions. Even with her yellow armband, if Matka was caught outside her block for the night she would face the bunker or worse. Plus, there were new rules to eliminate friendships, especially among the Poles: No visiting through block windows. No assisting one another at Appell. No speaking to one another without permission.

  Matka hugged each of us in turn, and I breathed the sweet scent of her in. From under her skirt, she produced a bundle, wrapped in clean white linen, and opened it to reveal a whole loaf of white bread. The top of it was browned golden and flecked with bits of salt. The yeasty smell of that bread! We each touched it in turn.

  “Another loaf?” asked Zuzanna. “Where are you getting it?”

  Matka smiled. “Don’t eat this all at once, or you’ll be sick.”

  Zuzanna slid the loaf under our pillow. Such a gift!

  Luiza huddled closer to Matka. “I think I found my greatest talent.”

  “Well?” Matka said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  Luiza produced a ball of baby-blue yarn from her pocket.

  I took it from her hand. “How did you get that?”

  She snatched it back. “I traded a cigarette I found in the platz for it. My supervisor says she’s never seen a person knit so fast. I finished two pairs of socks just today. I am no longer assigned to grading rabbit fur. I am only to knit from now on, at the Strickerei.”

  The Strickerei was the camp knitting shop, a queer place reserved for the fastest, best knitters. A peek inside revealed women sitting in rows knitting insanely fast, like a film going too quickly through the reel.

  I touched her arm. “You know those socks go to the front to warm the feet of German soldiers.”

  Luiza pulled away. “I don’t care. When we get out of here, I’m opening a knitting shop with every color yarn and will just knit all day.”

  “How wonderful,” Matka said, drawing Luiza near. “That’s bound to be any time now. Surely Papa and others…”

  Her gaze flicked to me. Others? Lennart?

  “…are working on our release.”

  “We were about to play What I’d Bring,” Janina said. It was still strange to see Janina without her flame-red hair. After they’d shaved her bald on our first day at camp, her hair had grown in fine and brown, like the down of a baby sparrow. Many others were allowed to keep their hair, but Binz had made a point of having Janina’s head shaved, since she put up such a fuss about it.

  “Matka doesn’t want to play that,” Zuzanna said, her face serious.

  “It’s a silly game, but will you play with us?” Janina asked.

  “Of course,” Matka said. “If we hurry.” She would do anything to make us happy.

  Janina pulled us all closer. “You have to say what you’d bring down Beauty Road.”

  Matka tipped her head to one side. “You mean—”

  “If it’s your last walk. For example, I’d bring the prettiest pair of the highest high heels. In black calf—no, suede—to walk tall in. Oh, and hair like Rita Hayworth—”

  “That’s two things,” Luiza said.

  “And a pair of falsies.”

  “Janina—” Zuzanna began.

  “What? I want to have a chest for once in my life. If I’m going to die, I want to look good doing it.”

  Zuzanna leaned in. “I’d bring a box of the best Polish chocolates, every type—vanilla creams, caramels, hazelnut—”

  “Stop it,” Janina said. She hated it when anyone talked about food and covered her ears when girls recited their favorite meals and recipes over and over.

  Luiza sat up straighter. “I’d bring my knitting. Once Binz saw how beautiful it was, she’d spare me.”

  Matka grinned, taking it all in. It was good to see her smile.

  It was my turn. I heard a Stubova call to someone from the washroom. She was close by, so I kept my voice low.

  “I’d bring a mattress with a giant goose-down comforter and sleep on the way. Binz’s guards would carry me, with Binz herself fanning me with a giant pink ostrich feather.”

  Janina stifled a snort-laugh.

  “What would you bring?” Zuzanna whispered, still laughing, to Matka.

  Matka thought for a long moment looking down at her hands, so long we thought maybe she wouldn’t play after all. When she finally did speak, it was with a queer look on her face.

  “I would bring a bouquet of flowers—roses and lilacs.”

  “Oh, I do love lilacs,” Luiza said.

  “I’d walk with my head high and on the way hand this bouquet to the guards and tell them not to blame themselves for what they did.”

  Did Matka not understand the lighthearted aim of the game?

  “When we got to the wall, I’d refuse the blindfold and shout, ‘Long live Poland!’ before…”

  Matka looked down at her hands.

  “I would miss you all very much,” she said with the barest smile.

  This serious answer made Zuzanna lose her happy face in an instant. The rest of us lost any laughter we’d had as well, and all became quiet. The thought of this happening was too horrible to dwell on.

  We all must have looked about to brim over with tears, so Matka changed the subject.

  “The Revier is running much better now—”

  “How is the woman doctor?” I said. So many questions and so little time.

  “Pleased it’s more organized, but I can no longer allow the sick to linger.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “Prisoners unable to work are done away with, so stay away from there. The woman doctor is not to be trusted. It’s best you all keep your distance.”

  “Germans,” Zuzanna said. “I’m ashamed for the part of us that’s German, Matka.”

  “Don’t say that. You should meet the good pharmacist from town, Paula Schultz. When she comes to deliver SS medicines, she slips me supplies—hair dye so the older women can look younger and escape selections. Heart stimulants so the weak can stand at Appell. She told me the Americans are—”

  A Stubova walked by our bunk, brushing her teeth, and spat into a tin cup.

  “Lights out!” she shouted.

  I held Matka tight, unable to let go, weeping like a child, until she had to pull away and sneak out, afraid she’d be caught. I felt such shame acting like this, but watching her through the window as she rushed off down Beauty Road and turned to throw us a kiss from the darkness was worse than the hunger or any beating.

  Such terrible agony.

  —

  LATER THAT WEEK ROZA came to the bunk room before morning Appell and read a list of ten prisoners to report to the Revier. Luiza, Zuzanna, and I were on the list.

  After the others were marched off to work, Roza led us down Beauty Road toward the Revier. “Come along, girls,” she said in a kind way.

  Where was the old Roza who’d slap us for dallying? One of my bad feelings was coming on, rising in my chest. The sunrise that morning turned the sky pink and blue as we approached the gray Revier block.

  I turned to Zuzanna. “What is happening?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, squinting in the morning sun.

  “We have Matka,” I said.

  “Of course,” Zuzanna said in a distant way.

  The Revier was oddly quiet that day. Matka was not at her post at the fat wooden desk in the front room. My gaze fixed on the yellow stool on which she usually sat to check patients in each day, now empty.

  “Where is your mother?” Luiza whispered as we passed it.

  Zuzanna looked about. “Here somewhere.”

  Roza handed us over to two sturdy SS nurses in brown uniforms, their caps, like clear, white cakes, bobby-pinned to their upswept hair. They led us down a hallway to a ward, a whitewashed room crammed with three sets of bunk beds and six singles. One window, the size of a doormat, sat up high
on the wall, almost touching the low ceiling. Suddenly the walls closed in. Why was there no air in the room?

  A girl I knew from Girl Guides named Alfreda Prus sat on one of the beds dressed in a hospital gown, hands folded in her lap.

  I wiped the smear of wetness off my upper lip. What was happening to us?

  One of the nurses told us to remove our clothes, fold them neatly, and put on hospital gowns with the backs open. I puffed my chest up with air to the point of bursting, then released it slowly. I would be calm for Luiza’s sake.

  Once the nurses left, Zuzanna paced about the room. She pulled a clipboard from a hook at the end of one bed and studied the blank chart attached.

  “What do you think is going on here?” Luiza asked.

  “Not sure,” Zuzanna said.

  “Just stay next to me,” I said.

  “I’ve been here for two days already with only a crazy Gypsy woman for company,” Alfreda said. “They took her away this morning. What do you think they’re up to? There are more girls in the next room. I heard one crying.”

  Zuzanna walked to the door between the two rooms and wrapped her fingers around the metal doorknob.

  “Locked,” she said.

  Soon the nurses ushered more Polish girls into the room, including a tall, quiet one named Regina who wore round reading glasses and taught a clandestine English class in our block. Janina Grabowski came in too. We put on our gowns, and Janina and Regina laughed since the open backs left our rear ends exposed to the breezes.

  “Maybe they’re sending us to a subcamp and have to give us special exams?” Alfreda said.

  “Maybe they’re sending us to the brothel,” Regina said.

  We all knew about the brothel being set up at another camp. Binz had made more than one recruitment announcement at Appell. She promised that in exchange for a few months of service volunteers would receive the finest clothes and shoes and guaranteed release from camp.

  “Stop, Regina,” I said.

  Luiza took my hand, and our palms met, both moist. “I’d rather die,” she said.

  “I brought my English phrasebook,” Regina said, placing it under one of the pillows. She’d made it from eighty sheets of toilet tissue, inscribed with the tiniest writing.