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By Root 395 0

group they intended to join. They did make contact with Polish partisans, who wanted no part of them. Some Polish units were very anti-Semitic; they preferred to have Jewish partisans fall into the hands of the Wehrmacht. In the end, Bern and his friends did little more in the forest than hide and raid neighboring farms to get food. The peasants got tired of it and helped the Germans set a trap. When they came to the usual village a few days ago, soldiers were waiting in every hut. Several partisans, including Bern, were taken alive. The Germans must have worked on them until they talked. Anyway, at dawn this morning, the Gestapo had gone to Reinhard’s apartment. They broke the door, but he was too fast for them. By the time they found him, he had already shot the old lady and then, right before them, sat down next to her on the bed and blew the top off his own head. A Polish policeman who was with them transmitted the story. So there was no immediate danger for Panna Tania and the boy; no one who knew how to find Panna Tania was left alive in T.

All the same, Hertz thought we should leave the apartment the next day at the latest. The Gestapo might find clues when they looked in Reinhard’s papers. It was also better, for the same reason, to get new Aryan papers with different names and leave for Warsaw. One could disappear in Warsaw better than in Lwów. He asked to see our papers. They were not bad, he concluded, but if Tania could pay he would get something really excellent, real papers and not forgeries, for a mother and son. In his judgment it was a mistake for Tania to present herself as my aunt. The idea of a young aunt living alone with a nine-year-old nephew could only arouse suspicion. Was she not a Jewess who had been unable to get papers for a mother and son and invented the aunt story? It was better to be a widow with a child or, best of all, someone whose husband retreated east with the Polish army and was now either dead or in a Russian prison camp for officers. That story was good for use with Poles and Germans. It was more complicated than saying her husband was in a prison camp in Germany, but a husband in a German camp could lead to problems with the German police.

Tania had become extremely calm. She took Hertz’s hand and kissed it; she said she had to thank him for more than he realized. We would do exactly as he advised, except that she wanted to leave the apartment that very day. The janitress was never there on Saturday afternoons. She and I would slip out with a small suitcase each. Did Hertz know where we could find a temporary place to stay? It turned out he did; there were furnished apartments, very small, in a building that was not very pleasant. They were usually rented to ladies of a special sort. Tania should say to the landlady that she had been given the address at the railroad station buffet. We had just arrived from Sambor; we were on our way to Cracow, but I had a fever, probably the beginning of measles, and she decided to interrupt the journey until the disease declared itself or the fever fell. That would give her a pretext to remain as long as necessary. With this landlady we might as well use the papers we had. But if Tania would meet him the following week at the post office, he hoped to be able to give her the new ones. He thought it was better that he not come to see us. If she was a stranger in Lwów with a sick child, why would she be receiving a visit?

The house we went to on Hertz’s advice resembled the one we had lived in with Pan and Pani Kramer in T. It had similar interior balconies, linked by straight stairs, and a wide gateway leading from the street to the yard. There was a well with a pump in the courtyard, but it was a remnant of older times; here, we had running water in the rooms. The apartment the landlady was willing to rent to Tania was off the first balcony, reached directly from the courtyard. It consisted of a kitchen, a little living room with artificial flowers on a table in the corner and a bedroom with a large bed. The toilet flushed, and for bathing there