Wartime lies - Louis Begley [61]
WE HAD been in Piasowe almost two months. On the train from Warsaw to R., Tania had grown increasingly nervous. Fortunately, it seemed that the Wehrmacht captain had not spoken to anyone about us before the train left the station, but it was only a matter of time before he talked, and then they would telephone the Gestapo in R. We would be picked up as soon as we got off the train. And why R., why had she said we were from R.? R. was much too big, really a little city, it would be full of Polish and German police. They would check our papers at the station, and how was she going to explain why we were traveling from Warsaw to R. instead of Auschwitz? We must get off at the next stop, G. She had never heard of G., so it must be small, perhaps without any police at the station. Also, if she was right, and the captain had talked by now, it was unlikely they would be looking for us in G. But we wouldn’t get off the train until it began to pull out of the G. station; that way the German reservist wouldn’t have an opportunity to interfere even if he was surprised we were not continuing to R. and became suspicious. We would simply wait near the railroad-car door, as though we were getting a breath of fresh air.
Tania was right. We left the train in G. unhindered. There were no policemen on the platform or in the station; outside, the town seemed asleep or deserted. We went into the first restaurant we saw. Tania asked for soup and bread; I was so hungry that the smell of the potato soup made me feel weak. The serving girl who took the order disappeared into the kitchen. Through the open door, we heard her talk and a man’s voice answer. The soup turned out to be wonderfully thick and hot. It burned its way down my throat to my stomach.
Before we finished eating, a man came out of the kitchen, said he was the owner, and very politely asked if he could sit down with us. Tania told him he was welcome and began to talk quickly about how good the soup tasted. He interrupted her with a smile; there were more serious matters he needed to discuss with her. He could see at a glance we had somehow managed to get out of Warsaw but wasn’t sure we understood what kind of danger we were in. The Germans had published orders not only to the police but to the entire population that refugees from Warsaw were to be turned over to the German police. Of course, we were not the first refugees to have reached G. Most had come at the beginning of August; apparently they had more or less walked out of the city and made their way here. Lately, there had been very few. He didn’t know what happened to the ones the Germans got. They were not seen again. He was going to help us, that was his responsibility, but the organization had limited means. All they could do was give us some clothes and find a peasant with a horse and cart to take us as far away from G. as the peasant could be persuaded to go. Then we would be on our own. But all that could wait until the morning. For the moment, we should eat all we could hold and then get a good sleep.
While we had more soup and later fried eggs with kielbasa, Tania and our host kept talking. She told him about the fighting during the last weeks in Warsaw and how we escaped. He explained about the Mazowsze, the region we were in. There were villages in this part of the country so remote and isolated—he hoped to send us to one of them—that they might as well be in another world. If Germans went there, it was to confiscate horses or pigs, not to check documents. The peasants had not changed in the last hundred years. They didn’t know that taking in refugees from Warsaw was forbidden or that money could be made blackmailing them. Probably not too many of them even knew there was such a place as Warsaw. But Tania didn’t need to feel guilty about the peasants: our presence wouldn’t be a danger for them. There weren’t enough Germans to look for refugees in those villages, where the devil wishes you good-night. He thought Tania might tell the peasants that we had run away