Such Good Girls by R. D. Rosen Read Free Book Online Page B

airfield to learn that Leming’s flight had been delayed. She waited hours for the plane to arrive and then had him paged. She hadn’t known what to expect, but still she was startled when a stern-looking and stubbly middle-aged man showed up in a gray SS tunic and an armband bearing a swastika.
    The thought that she had been hired by a Nazi was promptly replaced by the fear that he had already decided to fire her. As she introduced herself, he was complaining about the delayed flight and the “wretched Poles.” He promptly informed her that he would have nothing to do with her.
    Laura was desperate. She couldn’t return either to her job or to their rented room at the Polish officer’s house.
    “Bitte, Herr Leming—” she began.
    “Useless people!” he spat at her, saying he should’ve hired a German fräulein in the first place.
    She reminded him in German of his promise, saying she’d given up her job and lodging. Her little girl and she would have nowhere to go. Tears filled her eyes.
    Leming said that was her problem.
    “But I have your letters to me. You state very clearly—”
    He turned on his boot heels to go, saying that he was sure she would have no problem finding other employment.
    She played the only card left in her hand. She took a deep breath and said, “Herr Leming! I don’t imagine the Gestapo would be very pleased to know that you are not a man of your word.” She could hardly believe the words that were coming out of her mouth.
    He could have her arrested; it would be nothing to him. But when he turned back to face her, he looked worried, even frightened. Laura barely knew what to make of his expression. What chance did anyone have against secret police so powerful that an empty threat from a single mother could be instantly effective? Leming looked her up and down, stroked his chin, and said, “Well, well, Frau Tymejko, very good. Your German is excellent and you are obviously not a typical Pole.”
    It was the biggest automobile Zofia had ever seen that came to pick them up the next day. The chauffeur stared straight ahead behind the wheel while Leming himself opened the back door and beckoned to them. Zofia would have been truly frightened by her mother’s new employer if her mother didn’t seem so pleased about going to work and eager to get into the car.
    Leming had a large, lined face, big for his body, with a pointed, pomaded widow’s peak that made him look like the Count Dracula puppet Zofia had once seen in a department store window. Under his deeply furrowed forehead, which featured one sinister groove that bisected his forehead vertically, were two heavy-lidded eyes. His chin was so deeply cleft that it almost looked like someone’s bottom, but with stubble. Zofia was fascinated by this chin, as she had been by the Totenkopf on the SS hats.
    But the part of Leming’s face that she could barely take her eyes off of—that she had to force herself to ignore—was the short smudge of a mustache between his nose and thin upper lip, just like Adolf Hitler’s.
    Zofia sat quietly on the soft gray velour seat with her mother. Herr Leming himself hardly said a word during the two-hour journey to Busko-Zdrój. The town was small and no longer full of the well-dressed people who normally flocked to it for its famous natural sulfur springs. No one looked like they even knew a war was going on. The sanatorium was in a large beautiful park with a garden and chestnut trees, but surrounded by a town that looked like a place where nothing much ever happened.
    But, in fact, a great deal had just happened. Busko-Zdrój’s little ghetto, which had been created in April 1941, had already been liquidated by the time they arrived. Its two thousand Jews had been transferred to Jedrzejow, joining 4,000 others from the ghettos of Lodz, Wloclawek, and Warsaw on their way to the Treblinka death camp.
    Leming offered Laura and Zofia a room in his own apartment, but Laura declined, knowing what